Bevy raises $6.4 million for enterprise community events

Bevy has raised $6.4 million for its enterprise community event platform. The company is helping pioneer a new trend dubbed “customer to customer marketing” that involves prospective and current customers talking to each other.

The investment came from Upfront Ventures, author Steve Blank, Qualtrics cofounders Ryan and Jared Smith, and Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard.

The Palo Alto, California company raised funds to increase its growth rate and expand its team, which currently stands at 15 employees.

Bevy helps enterprises manage, scale, and track their community events and impact. The company aims to make scaling a global events community easy by facilitating millions of in-person conversations for clients like Atlassian, Duolingo, Docker, Evernote, and Startup Grind.

Bevy was created by the cofounders of Startup Grind to solve the frustration they felt using the available technologies to scale their global events community. Startup Grind is one of the world’s largest communities for startups, with chapters in 400 cities. The technology behind Bevy was spun out into a new company in 2017.

“Bevy is positioned to help companies build customers and brand through scaling community events,” said Bevy CEO Derek Andersen, in a statement. “Our team has been solving this problem since 2010, and we are thrilled to build a product for marketers looking to create deep relationships with their customers. We help companies spread their products and values through rich in-person interactions.”

Bevy handles event creation and management, email delivery and list management, sponsorship management, analytics tracking, industry best permissions settings, API tie-ins to major marketing platforms, administrative tools for companies to run distributed C2C programs, and over 300 custom settings for enterprises to match brand needs.

The founders include Andersen, cofounder of Startup Grind; Joel Fernandes, chief technology officer and cofounder of Startup Grind, Alex Bendig, chief information officer and an early team member of About.me and Sphere.